Dhamaal With Mansi

I went to the 10:45 PM show of the new slapstick, Dhamaal with my fiance Mansi last night. We usually take a call about which movie to see when we reach the theater; Inox always has a lot of choice. It was a light-hearted, over-acted comedy with garishly-clothed male actors who did a great job of entertaining their audience of middle-aged couples and their kids (some teenagers and others even younger). The over-acting, for once, worked. I'm a fan of working to your strengths. Similarly, it's great to see a play, in which the actors talk with their natural intonation and in Mumbai-English slang as opposed to putting on a fake British or American accent, which can make you hair stand on end as even well-trained call-center employees do. In contrast, whatever previews I saw of Black horrified me. The characters which were meant to be played with subtlety and sensitivity reminded me instead of crude soap-opera histrionics.

What i liked most about Dhamaal was the underlying theme of how money changes people and relationships. Friendships are broken and enemies become friends. The movie also has fun with the physical extremes that people go to get their hands on money. The characters undertake death-defying, mind-numbing, and abuse-ridden journeys to get to their goal. What's great is that the movie doesn't take a serious moralistic view of the love of money, but seems to say that money is important but if you share it with others who are needy you will be far happier. The movie ends with all the characters donating all their hard-earned cash to an orphanage. It is true that they agree to the donation as they are in front of a crowd of thousands of people. It's almost as if the the sharing of wealth needs a large unseen benevolent "big brother" who guides even the hesitant characters to do the right thing. It is an interesting socialist twist to a movie, that seems to be examining capitalist ideology.

I watched Mansi laughing throughout the movie. Whatever the ideology, the movie was a successful entertainer.